CTRL/SHIFT - 13 06 2026 PARTHENOPE STAGE - OLGA ARZHAEVA - ACQUIRING THE FUTURE

Now we have uh Olga talking. So uh she was here the entire afternoon um as MC presenting our panelist. But now it's my turn to present her uh to to to the speech. So let's give a short applause to Olga acquiring the future in the strategy uh the strategic role of merging and acquisition in fintech payments industry consolidation. Wow, what a long title.

Just acquiring the future then.

Yeah, definitely.

Just let's acquire something.

Okay. Tell tell us how we can do a merant acquisition in uh the the blockchain ecosystem. Okay. Thank you, Olga.

Thank you for introduction. Yeah, it's a sort of transition already to present my annual research here in Naples. Uh so this time, yeah, perhaps just waiting for a second for these slides. And yeah, meanwhile I will represent uh what I found in terms of trends of M&A especially of course targeting fintech and that was very helpful to listen also previously to Franchesco to understand what was in DeFi world and now I will target like more all the digital asset space and of course the convergence with traditional finance as it should be. So yeah, derivatives would wouldn't be touched anymore.

We'll go to Okay. Nice. Yeah, as Y said, it was a bit long title uh for creating the future and all the strategic things. Second Yeah. So let me present also briefly myself.

I'm mostly working with these two companies or one is association and I have my fellow peers here as well listening to me. So first Herkl I'm leading business operations there. Herkle is an infrastructure for crossber payments. So basically facilitating all the mining movement. And here you already can see my interest in exploring how payments are evolving in the last years.

And the second one, I'm the co-founder and co-president of blockchain student association Italy. We're the closest partner of the European Association as well. So we are trying to make this gap between university and the real world of business and also I just finished my master in corporate finance in Dukoni. what surged significantly my interest in M&A and all the finance related world. So let's go.

Uh that's very simple. I wouldn't of course dive into details of the payments but just to get some background understanding what was prefintech is T plus 3 I don't know T plus2 settlement and plus then 3% of the fees when we're traveling all the way from point A to point B and what happened in the fintech era we don't have even intermediaries so it's almost 0% cost and it's instant settlement which is facilitated usually just by one intermediary for instance taking the funds from point B and transporting them to the end. Oops not working. Yeah. And from that of course we have went to discover what is actually happening in the world of the fintech as of course everyone knows that there are major acquisitions happening and main companies I don't know Mastercard to name the last ones is acquiring the smaller fintexs.

So basically what are the real strategic rationals behind those acquisitions we can first deep dive into the old payment stack as anticipated the main issue here is that we have all the systems as a as chaps as sepa developed in uh 1970s so that's quite uh many years ago I would say and famous T+1 T plus2 settlement which is of course making the payments inefficient Second of all, we have the huge cost of it because as World Bank is reporting, we have from 6 to 9% of the cost in 2017 and we had the target set to be achieved by 2030 or 3%. And honestly, in some quarters, especially in emerging ones, we're still not in this point. So that's a huge issue huge issue as for the businesses also for the end users because they ultimately facing all these fees when they are sending money abroad and that's one of the main points when we have huge remittance flow and the huge globalization flow when we're not usually living in our own countries. So also is here anyone from Italy? Okay, only one person.

So we're all internationals of course that's the conference. Yeah, but but still that's a lot of traveling happening. So I said yeah about G20 targets and another huge main point is the preunding. So how international payments are working. We have different banks involved and to make the payment and to pay yeah in one country in the second usually companies before tended to preund their accounts in the country B so to facilitate this payment and that's a huge cost as you see business reporting again.

Yeah. two to 5% of transaction which is resulting as lost capital in a sense. So what happened here? I outlined five layers. Five layers which in my opinion are the ones where the fintech actually changed something and also the five names of the companies.

And let me begin then to explain one by one layer one which is the acceptance that's the foundation for all the payments for all the money movement. And here we have again this famous uh 1970s like last century developed systems which were inefficient. It was like a batch transactions settling uh one two days later encountering the cost. Here we have stripe which revolutionized everything. Basically the proposition was very simple.

before you needed to have a big tech team to integrate everything to onboard all your merchants and so on. So again costs cost and cost and I will repeat it all over this presentation because that's ultimately what business cares about. And Stripe just provided us with very simple integration methodology. It's only about like few rows which you can integrate and accept the payments. Later we go to the second layer with the company Nexi which is a famous European company already using M&A to emerge because it was integrating different smaller businesses to create this unique network to transport the payments all across European Union and the most importantly have the direct implementation into all the European rails.

So, Nexi is capable to transmit the information without relying on any other intermediaries being basically this like umbrella aggregating all the more local methods. Third layer is custody. I would say custody just to be a bit you know more digital assets in terms but here I would also refer to the traditional banking because banking circle which is I'm providing here is very famous in the web free space as it manages to provide this access and bridge I would say between traditional world and defy world by accepting the merchants by accepting like fintex who want to do payouts at almost zero cost and to deliver it instantly again. So that's about real optimization here. The fourth layer uh here I'm going to mention my company because that's a fact and liquidity and effects and liquidity is a huge point also if we know their story of revolute the initial idea of their founder was to optimize the effects because that's not okay that banks have one rate and we have two completely different point as customers when we're doing the conversions between different currencies.

So here we encounter stable coin rails as instance which helps us optimize and leverage on the liquidity. So basically we are not referring to the banks themselves anymore but we are going to the intermediaries as her in that case which can help us deliver the liquidity instantly and make it at almost zero cost because we are relying on the defi stuck here. And the last is the infrastructural rails. And here I mentioned Tron because Tron compared to the the classical SAPA or the classical swift will show you this difference between T plus2 settlement and singledigit cost and almost 0% and one to five I don't know depends of course on the network but in case of Tron uh instant settlement and also to reflect Tron processed $83 of volume in the last 12 months in 2025. So that's a big number.

Now that we broke down all these layers, so the five that I mentioned, we're moving to the narrative. Everyone saw this like rotor, CNBC, the blog, acquisitions, acquisitions, acquisitions. And the numbers are astonishing, isn't it? Like $1.8 billion paid for the company.

That's crazy. Of course, we have the smaller ones, but that's a huge number. Here I provided also the statistics on M&A. M&A began roughly in 2020 as like the major trend. Here I focused on the last years because the trend was going up.

Later we had the famous FTX crisis. So in 2022 it was a bit on the pose as I can say and again in 2023 we began to observe the trend which you see is of course going a bit down and up but majorly in 2025 we are seeing this amazing numbers which were never phrased by the industry. So we can ask for ourselves what's actually happening why we spend so much in uh mergers and acquisitions and why we do not develop anything internally or better we develop but we prefer to acquire the companies and here as I said uh that's the first wave wave one in my opinion we can distinguish the M&A between uh two periods the first one which is I'm representing here is the scale consolidation so here the companies are mainly focusing on the cost synergies across two to five years or 3 to 5 years we are facing 20 to 30% cost reduction just because driven that we can reduce some functions and converge them into the one single entity so multiples as you see here are roughly 15 20x EV over IDA that's still already a very very huge valuation I would say and companies are acquiring ing all the existing clients and existing infrastructure to make them bigger and to reduce the costs. That's the narrative. Later from 2021 onwards and that's the phase where we are now.

We have second wave of capabilities acquisition. Capabilities acquisition is not anymore about scale. It's not anymore me acquiring the company just because we can become huge and we cut the costs. If you will look also at examples of these companies. So of course yeah I listed the major ones bridge ka are very famous but we have also the companies at early stages.

So we even would better evaluate them at revenues and we would better see what are the premium drivers here. So it's not anymore about the costs. Do you see it's stable coin infrastructure it's all about regulmentation or other factors. So here famous example Mastercard and BVNK serious beam raised in two 2024 December 140% valuation difference one year after when we acquiring at 1.8 8 billion.

So that's huge. And here I listed also three main drivers here. Premiums of this valuation. Control premium of course because we just raised round. So there are many ownerships included and we need to undertake them all and replace strategic synergy because uh Mastercard wanted this access to stable coin rails and all the infrastructure that BVNK had developed by the time.

That was a huge one. And the third one is urgency premium. We have Visa. We have Mastercard and Visa competing basically between them. So either Mastercard acts now either it won't have any opportunity later on.

Here I listed four strategic drivers of payments and that you will basically see in every M&A transaction. First of all mentioned is technological capability. we are saving two to three years of internal developments by just acquiring the company. So I have this ready stack and I integrate it. The second is a regulatory uh licensing is everything.

Everywhere you will go also in this conference you will hear everyone talking about licensing especially yes especially you it's a huge problem and not every company can wait until they get a proper license so they prefer to cut this way and just go directly client base which is still major thing then the company wants to expand and here I can make an example of Coinbase and data bit so when Coinbase wanted to expand on the derivatives offering they acquired the biggest exchange which had the biggest client base there to put it all under their umbrella and the last one is of course the last but not least I can say even like that is the company and all the talent inside it because the talent is something that we can bring in and start developing and start growing together. So the expertise of founders and this field is something what can never be in traditional finance. Of course we have the risks uh risks related to all this wave. First one acquisition windows limited that's what I mentioned we have bunch of companies but the best ones already being acquired and if you want to act we need to act now. The second is integration model adaptability.

If you will see the last acquisitions the companies are not always integrated fully but sometimes they put like a side. So of course BBNK for instance by master card. Yeah, bridge with stripe they still put a bit to the side and not fully integrated just because it will first trigger for instance regulatory uh points and the second one the team not all the team from major fintex are capable of functioning within the major companies with all the legacy problems and execution risks. So large scale integrations are increasing of course this appetite for future acquisitions and that's this like circle which is going and every time it's getting bigger and bigger so of course we sort of moving in the direction that we need to do something now here also snapshot on regulatory environments as I mentioned that's mainly US and the main uh of course yeah clarity act genius act So I would not repeat I'm not illegal but just I mean to mention that's really really crucial stuff the companies are looking at and the famous mica especially in Italy we have many many issues related and companies are very actively looking for some targets they can acquire and get this license ready and of course all the discussion about the CBDC's is not the last one CBDC's can be seen as a substitute or can be seen as something additional to the traditional D5 system. So here the companies are trying to monitor it closely whether we would collaborate with the government and with all the uh players of this ecosystem or whether it will be like a different model of substitution as I can say just to make the outline regulatory license established client base minimum viable scale which is essential in this second M&A wave and the product efficiency that creates the perfect target.

If you have four of them, I guess one of major brands may approach your company in the next months and ask some potential interesting questions regarding that. I will just leave you with this phrase. talking to many practitioners from the field, talking to many companies and seeing the already numbers from the last years, I would say the next 24 months are the ones that will define the next trends because the best companies will be acquired. So those that have capabilities and you see every day news just yesterday again one M&A tomorrow will be another one. So that's a huge trend and I believe that in two years we'll actually have the market trend sort of defined.

So that's was it again here are the main two logos you need to remember associate I would say with me Herk and blockchain student association Italy you can find me on linkin you can find me also here of course in the event and happy to stay in touch hope this was helpful open to the questions